Stevie Parle’s Pastaio has been a key player in London’s ever-growing cheap pasta revolution and the chef is gearing up to open a second location in the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush – the first of a planned expansion throughout London for the fledgling brand and good news for anyone left disappointed when a planned Marylebone outpost fell through.
Pasta dishes start from £6 and go up to £30 for sharing plates and the menu features classics familiar from the Soho original. With two kitchens (one purely for making fresh pasta), there is vongole linguine with garlic and anchovies, wild mushroom tagliatelle with parmesan, and a prawn, clam and mussel seafood paccheri sharing dish. To finish, there is soft-serve stracciatella-flavoured ice cream and you can wash it all down with a prosecco slushy.
The menu will change regularly to showcase new variations on traditional pasta dishes, all using fresh seasonal ingredients and with pasta made from scratch daily.
The only downside is that Pastaio is no bookings, though with space for up to 145 people (including on an outdoor terrace and balcony), the queues shouldn’t be too long. Interiors will stay true to the Soho restaurant with interior designer Tom Dixon collaborating to create a modern and welcoming space for anyone looking to take a break from shopping.
This new Shepherd’s Bush Pastaiao marks a return for Stevie Parle to his west London roots. Having trained at The River Café in Hammersmith, the chef sprang to fame at Dock Kitchen, a modern European restaurant by the Grand Union Canal at the top end of Ladbroke Grove – which also just happened to be next door to Tom Dixon’s head office. The River Café has always been famous for the quality of its fresh pasta, and Parle was obviously an attentive student.